8 Reasons “Alyas Robin Hood” is Nothing Like “Arrow”

8 Reasons

Alyas Robin Hood

is Nothing Like ArrowBy Kel Fabie

A lot has been said about the lack of originality for Filipino television writers ever since the teasers for Alyas Robin Hood came out, and almost like clockwork, the head writer of the show took the criticism very personally.

We get what she means when she says that Alyas Robin Hood is totally not a rip-off of Arrow, and we even understand that originality is in shortage not just in the Philippines, but pretty much anywhere creative work needs to be churned out on a regular basis, be it Hollywood or Philippine Television. This is exactly why we gave the first week of Alyas Robin Hood a watch, just so we could see for ourselves just how different it is from Arrow, and boy, did they prove it!

Unfortunately, they didn’t prove how different they were from Arrow in the way they probably hoped to. Here are 8 examples of what we mean.

8. The political themes.

Oliver Queen ran for Mayor in Season 4 of Arrow. Alyas Robin Hood, on the other hand, insists that it will have a lot of political themes that simply never existed in Arrow.

While that’s a good idea on paper, do we really need our escapist fantasy to reflect the horrible real life we try to take a break from when we watch these shows in the first place?

7. The folklore of Robin Hood

Pepe grew up idolizing Robin Hood, and ended up taking on that guise when he decided to fight crime while trying to find the people who killed his father. His father was killed because he overheard the evil plans of some nasty people who apparently like discussing their evil plans over merienda out in the open instead of in more private quarters like real evil people do.

I’m even willing to bet that Christopher De Leon’s epic facial hair came long before Jamey Sheridan’s. Points for doing it first, Alyas Robin Hood!

Oliver Queen’s dad, on the other hand, commits suicide to save him when they were both stranded on an island together.

5. Not-Heatwave!

Now, before you insist that this is enough confirmation that Alyas Robin Hood stole shamelessly from Arrow, I need to point out that Heatwave, the fire-based villain, is from Flash, not Arrow. See? Totally not the same thing at all!

4. The non-super villains

Where Arrow tries to humanize even its worst villains by giving them a multi-faceted, even sympathetic side to their character, Alyas Robin Hood still relies on caricatures and mustache-twirling villains who are evil for the sake of being evil, such as the Mayor of Tent City.

Not depicted: nuance.

3. The fight choreography

While both use cut-to-cut shots to make the action seem more fast-paced, it becomes pretty clear that Alyas Robin Hood took its fight scenes in a completely different direction when compared to Arrow’s.

And is it just me, or does Chino the flamethrower dude look like he could be brothers with the camcording guy in the Derek MTRCB commercial? Villainy runs in the family!

Look: we get it. Not all fights can be as hard-hitting as Old Boy or Daredevil, but when I watch something as kitschy as Julio Valiente or any old FPJ film, I can see that we have always had pretty decent fight choreography for decades. So what the heck happened here?

2. The props

Let’s give a pass for special effects, because even Arrow falls short of its own lofty standards from time to time. Let’s talk about the props.

Yeah, that’s terrifying, all right. It terrifies me how anyone thought they could get away with this.

The props are so bad that one of my co-writers here found 8 toy guns from his son’s collection that could have looked even better. The props are so bad that Lydon Gregorio’s joke on it makes you laugh and cry at the same time.

1. The excuses

Real talk, guys: originality is hard to come by nowadays. In the realm of creative work, there are only so many ways to tell the tale of a Robin Hood analog, and I get it when the head writer decries people who dismiss her work for being derivative. Arrow, even for a fan such as myself, is far from perfect, which makes it all the more bewildering that someone would rip it off yet completely miss the things that makes Arrow really fun when it’s on point.

Kel Fabie. is a DJ, host, mentalist, satirist, comedian, and a long-time contributor to 8List (Hello, ladies!). He has an Oscar, a Pulitzer, a Nobel, and two other weirdly-named pet dogs. He blogs on mistervader.com.